A limousine is a kind of set; to enter one is to play a role, even without a camera present. “When people come into the car, everybody is dressed up, and you take on a new persona when you dress fancy,” Shorr told me. “Your behavior and manner are very different than if you’re just going out in jeans or sweats with the same people. Your persona elevates. But, as time goes by, your real personality comes out.” Look at Shorr’s photo of a trio of bridesmaids pressed together on the car’s back bench, having a drink in the middle of the afternoon, relaxing on their way to the reception. The one by the window has just taken a pull on her cigarette; dress bunched up around her knees, she looks away from Shorr’s camera, having briefly put away her public face.
“Limousine” offers a delightful time-capsule view of a bygone era in fashion—hair teased to the heavens, satin dresses with tight hips and big puffed shoulders, acid-washed jeans rolled at the cuff—and of a bygone New York, too. Most of the people whom Shorr photographed were working-class Brooklynites, as was she. This was the era of corporate raiders, greed-is-good Wall Street ambitions, Trump Tower. The limousine was seen as an accessory to such ostentatious wealth, but it was affordable to rent one, especially with a group; it represented, Shorr told me, “the idea that you, as a working-class person, could live or act like a rich person, if only for a day.” One of Shorr’s photos shows a group of young men in bow ties who look like they might be bond traders. They lounge with their legs up, confidently meeting the camera’s gaze. They are ushers at a wedding, on the way from Brooklyn to a reception in the Bronx. “They were the kind of guys I grew up with,” Shorr recalled. “They were very, very polished. Their clothes were impeccable; their hair was just right. And they were playing with the dynamic of me being a woman and them being men, you know, a flirtatious kind of thing. They got into that pose; they just worked with me. I know they gave me a very nice tip.”
